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Sintering process
Our customer designed and developed a new system for the production of sintered molds. In order to make the pressing process during the sintering process as flexible as possible and with high repeat accuracy, he opted for a complete drive solution in the form of the flexiPRESS from Parkem.
The pressing process is primarily determined by the constantly changing load of the powder to be pressed. On the one hand, the force increases with increasing pressing pressure, on the other hand, the force decreases as the material relaxes. For this reason, specific dynamic functions have been added to the standard easyPRESS press functions. The permanent force control enables a high production quality and reproducibility of the manufactured products. This is in contrast to the pneumatic presses previously used for this process, where the maximum pressing force was only set via the maximum pressure and was therefore subject to greater tolerances in pressing accuracy.
The drive train was realized with an electric actuator from the ETH series, which is controlled via a servo synchronous motor. The comPRESS press control takes over both the control of the motor and the complete control of the process, the evaluation of the force sensor, the control panel and the interfaces. This is possible thanks to the control system integrated in the comPRESS. This eliminates the need for an external PLC. Thanks to the high-resolution encoder and the force sensor, the process can be precisely controlled and monitored so that the molds produced are always of consistent quality and fluctuations can be responded to immediately.
The machine is operated via a touchscreen. Various manual and automatic modes are available to the operator. Pressing can be carried out either by force or position. The production parameters of various products can be stored via the recipe management system.
Parkem designed the entire drive train, expanded the control software according to the specific process requirements and created the visualization. The customer was also trained during commissioning on site.
